Confessions…

Although not a religious person, I need to make confession this morning   Last night I committed one of poker’s great sins, so I’m going to talk about it here to make sure I get it out of my system and don’t do it again!

 I was playing my regular 50nl game and had found a good table with some mediocre players and one total donk, playing at about 80 VPIP.  Trouble was this particular donk was hitting hands with regularity.  He stacked me once with a set vs straight situation, bit of a cooler.  But the trouble began when the other people drifted away and somehow we ended up heads up.  And here’s where I committed the sin – I was determined to “get even” for the session – so I continued to play this guy, certain I could take it all back of him.  I committed the great error of treating the session as something I HAD to come out positive – instead of just taking it hand by hand and trying to make good decisions.

Result – I kept getting decent starting hands, raising, getting called, then missing the flop, cont betting, getting called, then having to give up the hand when it was becoming obvious he wasnt folding.  As I mentioned earlier, he was on a hot run – so I eventually lost three buyins.  I just didnt believe he could be hitting all the time but he seemed to be … I finally got top pair with KQ, Q on board and decided to go with it … he of course had AQ.  The other buyin was just from a series of hands where I had to give up.

So the point is – I’m disappointed, not becuase I got outdonked, but becuase I put myself in the situation in the first place by being so determined I could recover my session loss by running over this donk.  Poker just doesn’t work like that.  It really is one long lifetime session, and it is more than counter-productive to try and “win” a particular session.  While intellectually I knew this, emotionally I’ve just had this lesson reinforced the hard way!

Interestingly, I’m now about to have my first session since last night.  It’s an interesting challenge to clear the mind and not have last night’s loss lingering in the mind.  It’s easy to get defensive not wanting to incur further losses.  Of course playing scared is likely to actually facilitate poor sessions.  I’m curious to hear though, any readers out there, how you  mentally refresh yourself after a particularly bad session or sessions.